Member Reviews

कोलकाता शहर में मर्डर हो रहे हैं-एक के बाद एक। सिर्फ अकेली रह रही लड़कियों के मर्डर। हर लाश दीवार पर टंगी मिलती है। ज़ाहिर है कि यह किसी सीरियल किलर का काम है। डी.सी.पी. कनिष्क चटर्जी हैरान है क्योंकि बिल्कुल इसी पैटर्न पर 12 साल पहले भी कई मर्डर हुए थे लेकिन वह कातिल तो कैद में है। तो कौन कर रहा है ये मर्डर…? और इससे भी बड़ा सवाल यह कि क्यों कर रहा है वह ये मर्डर…? इस किस्म की रहस्यमयी मर्डर-मिस्ट्री वाली फिल्मों में अक्सर कहानी का फोकस ‘कौन कर रहा है’ के साथ-साथ ‘क्यों कर रहा है’ पर भी होता है। सीरियल किलिंग आमतौर पर मनोरोगी, मनोविक्षिप्त लोग किया करते हैं, सो ऐसी कहानियों को सस्पैंस थ्रिलर के साथ-साथ साइकोलॉजिकल-थ्रिलर का बाना पहनाया जाता है। लेखक प्रतिम डी. गुप्ता ने यहां भी ऐसा ही किया है और बखूबी किया है। इसके साथ ही उन्होंने इन हत्याओं की तफ्तीश में जुटे चार पुलिस अफसरों की निजी ज़िंदगियों में भी बखूबी झांका है। ऐसा करने से ये लोग ज़्यादा ‘मानवीय’ लगे हैं और वास्तविक भी। यही इस फिल्म (चालचित्र Chaalchitro) की खूबी है कि यह अपना धरातल नहीं छोड़ती। इसे देखते हुए यह नहीं लगता कि आप फिल्मी मसालों में डूबी कोई कहानी देख रहे हैं। हालांकि कुछ एक बैक स्टोरीज़ कहीं-कहीं कमज़ोर पड़ती है और कहीं-कहीं स्क्रिप्ट भी हौले-से लड़खड़ाई है, लेकिन एक लेखक के तौर पर प्रतिम जहां हल्के पड़े, एक निर्देशक के तौर पर वह उसे संभाल लेते हैं। उनके निर्देशन में कसावट है और वह फिल्म में ज़रूरी तनाव, भय, रोमांच व इमोशन्स रच पाने में कामयाब रहे हैं।

If you are one of those die-hard cinephiles who believe Die Hard is a Christmas film (along with the first two Home Alone flicks), then Netflix’s latest offering may very well make it to that coveted list of yours. Jaume Collet-Serra, the mastermind behind some simple yet efficient nail-biting action thrillers is back and while he’s not teaming up with Liam Neeson this time, he’s got an efficient Taron Egerton and a cast-against-the-grain Jason Bateman facing it off in Carry-On.

‘Baby John’ has all the trappings of a mass entertainer, having been produced by Atlee, the record-maker ‘Jawan’ director whose remake of Tamil film ‘Their’ it is. Headlined by a fairly bankable star, Varun Dhawan, who can certainly act, he does try to energise the proceedings. South Indian sensation Keerthy Suresh is making her Bollywood debut and yesterday’s ‘Hero’ Jackie Shroff plays the vilest of vile badman. On the side is the beautiful and talented Wamiqa Gabbi.

Like it happens with the follow-up for any successful show, I entered the Squid Game 2 with a fair bit of trepidation. What worked in the first season was the shock value of the setting that posits the innocence of childhood games, sophisticated Western classical music with a kind of savagery few would be able to stomach. Where unsuspecting debt-ridden civilians are lured onto an island to play a series of games – for which they stand to win an obscene amount of money, or pay for it with their life. A cruel, but clinical simulation of our lives in a hyper-capitalist society, the appeal of Squid Game lay in how it studied human nature – especially the ones with limited means, who are driven to take desperate measures. How far would you go to survive/get paid? As the first season showed: to any length.

It often takes no more than five minutes to tell that a ten-episode series is going to be … not good. Yet, it’s my job to watch the whole thing. I can’t just abandon it the moment I realise it’s fundamentally flawed. So, I spend a day or two watching the next 395 minutes, hoping against hope that a miracle changes my mind. But, of course, it never comes—the craft is all wrong, the writing is dated, the music is uninspired, and the acting is everywhere. Yet, when a series is so long and stubborn and voluminous, one tends to develop a strange attachment to it. There’s no escape, so I simply make peace with—and normalise—the mediocrity at hand. It’s a reluctant bond, the kind you have with a month-long cough. But it’s a bond nevertheless, and when it ends, a part of your life ends. That’s what Doctors became to me.

Sarathkumar tasted great success playing a moody cop in the commercially and critically acclaimed Por Thozhil (2023). Since then he has been trying to emulate its success in vain. Smile Man, his 150th film, is another such attempt, in which the actor yet again plays a brooding CBCID office grappling with Alzheimer’s disease, who is also on a hunt for a serial killer, notoriously known as Smile Man. Like most serial killer films in Tamil, Smile Man also suffers from the usual problems of convenient writing, cliches, and redundant flashbacks. Honestly, the film kicks off on a promising note. The epilogue has Chidhamabaram (Sarathkumar) chasing the serial killer only to get bashed by him after a near-fatal accident. The unknown killer swears to come back if Chidhambaram chooses to show up again as a cop. Meanwhile, we learn that Chidambaram’s partner (Sunil Menon), who is currently missing, has closed the Smile Man case, claiming that the serial killer was shot dead. Yet, in the present day, the murder starts to happen again. Bodies of victims with skin carved out to make a smiling face (the modus operandi of the killer) are found in the city, and Chidhambaram, despite his health condition, joins the force again to finish what he had started years ago.

Debutant director Mohanlal has been hung up on the 3D element of Barroz: Guardian of Treasures. So much so that every other aspect of the film has gotten little to no attention. Even Mohanlal, the incredible performer, is absent as everything about Barroz comes across as a stage play captured on camera. The only focus of the team has been to come up with various ways to gloat the 3D elements of the film on the face of the viewer. A flower bouquet will get an unnecessary slow-motion shot as Barroz extends it to Isabell (Maya Rao). The idea is to impress the audience as the flowers extend outside the screen, but even children (who seem to be the target audience of the film) lose interest as such gimmicks become redundant. Beyond the brilliant execution of the 3D technology and the superlative production design, Barroz has little to offer concerning an engaging story.

Nothing screams ‘crisis’ in Hindi cinema right now more than Salman Khan showing up in his second ‘star cameo’ of the year – hedging his bets between two cinematic universes; hoping at least one of them works. Something works. This is not a spoiler, given how the film’s PR and fan accounts are enthusiastically ‘leaking’ his entry scene on social media. Khan’s films proudly flaunted their ‘critic-proof’ status for a long time, but have looked increasingly silly in the last five years. Apart from YRF’s spy universe, Khan’s Chulbul Pandey has announced himself in the Rohit Shetty cop universe, and now alongside Varun Dhawan in the Baby John universe – where he’s called (what else, but) Agent Bhai Jaan. It looks like even Bollywood’s loosest canon is looking to diversify his portfolio, fervently praying to make windfall gains from one franchise. The devil-may-care swagger has been replaced with the caution of a star unsure of his place.

The arrival of Squid Game in 2021 was met with overwhelming resonance and relevance. In a world ravaged by the pandemic which had shifted power structures, altered priorities for both individuals and institutions and given birth to an existential crisis which compelled many of us to question purpose and privilege, the South Korean series — that Netflix dropped with very little fanfare — may have spoken, much like the Oscar biggie Parasite, about the class chasm in that country as well as fast-growing debt and the perils of the rise of capitalism in the South Korean economy, but it found itself touching a chord with audiences across the world.

Logic, chronology, geography, sensitivity, ear drums and brain cells all take a hike in Baby John. The big-budget production that attempts to launch Varun Dhawan as an all-out action star is an all-round assault on the senses, partially redeemed by only a few clap-worthy moments mostly credited to ‘VD’, which is what the baby-faced actor is introduced as at the beginning of Baby John. I haven’t watched Theri, the 2016 Tamil blockbuster which was purely a fan-service exercise for diehard followers of Thalapathy Vijay. I am not sure if Varun has the kind of fans — I mean by demographic and not volume — that would queue up feverishly to watch him defy the laws of physics to make easy work of 10 men at one go or swing his sunglasses in one swift movement as some sort of a signature style, a mid-level tribute to everyone from the iconic Rajinikanth to the magnetic Chulbul Pandey.